View Library Folder On Mac

04.04.2020by
View Library Folder On Mac Rating: 4,7/5 695 reviews
  1. View Library Folder Mac Yosemite
  2. View Library Folder Mac

Your Mac has a secret. Thousands of them in fact, in the form of hidden files and folders lurking on its hard drive or SSD. Don’t worry, though. These files and folders are all supposed to be there. In fact, many of them are essential.

Many of these files are in your Mac’s main Library folder or in the ~/Library folder, which is in your User folder. Both these Library folders are hidden, but inside them are folders and files that hold things like preferences for apps.

In this article, we’ll tell you how you can view hidden files on your Mac and make your Library folder visible.

View library folder mac mojave

What are the hidden files on Mac?

The hidden files are a throwback to macOS’ Unix roots. In fact, the convention of naming them starting with a “.” comes from Unix. For that reason, you can’t use a “.” at the start of a regular file name, otherwise OS X will hide it.

With the release of Mac OS X Lion way back in 2011, Apple removed easy access to the user’s Library folder. Although arguably well-intentioned, this change was frustrating for longtime Mac power. Mar 12, 2020  There’s a reason that the Library folder on your Mac is tucked away out of site. This all-important folder holds files that your system uses like containers, application scripts, font files, caches, and other types of files. Apple hides this folder by default to reduce the risk of accidental.

The files themselves contain data like access rights and privileges for files and folders, application support files, and preferences.

JW Library is an application oriented mainly to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. JW Library is the official application of the Jehovah’s Witnesses (JW are the initials of Jehovah Witnesses), which includes a translated version of the Bible, as well as a lot of books and pamphlets to study.The The content of the application is exactly what you would expect from the official Jehovah’s Witness app, and your members will certainly be happy with it. The interface of the application, in addition, is very correct, since it will allow us to pass of page with only sliding the finger by the screen, or to mark any page like favorite. Surely these will be pleased with both its content and its interface (which is very well worked).More from Us:Here we will show you today How can you Download and Install Books & Reference App JW Library on PC running any OS including Windows and MAC variants, however, if you are interested in other apps, visit our site about Android Apps on PC and locate your favorite ones, without further ado, let us continue. Download watchtower library for mac.

There are a number of reasons files and folders are hidden. Mostly, though, it’s because they contain data critical to the smooth running of your Mac and that you shouldn’t interfere with. In addition, there’s no real reason for most users to see or access them. Also, if they were all visible, your Mac would look horribly cluttered.

How to view hidden files on Mac

Before you make your Mac show hidden files, it’s important to remember they’ve been hidden for a reason. The data they contain could cause havoc if you delete or alter it and don’t know what you’re doing.

If your goal in viewing, for example ~/Library is so you can manually delete application support files for a program you’ve uninstalled, consider using a dedicated uninstaller like CleanMyMac X. That will make it easy to remove all the files associated with an application with one click. You can download CleanMyMac X for free here.

CleanMyMac X will also allow you to get rid of all the hidden files you no longer need. Many of these files are created and used then not needed anymore. They just sit there clogging up your hard drive. CleanMyMac X scans your Mac, identifies this system junk and allows you to quickly and easily get rid of it, potentially several gigabytes of disk space.

If you still want to view hidden files on your Mac, you need to go to the Finder and do the following:

  1. Open a new Finder window and click on the name of your Mac under ‘Devices’ in the sidebar.
  2. Click on Macintosh HD, or whatever you’ve called your startup drive if you’ve renamed it.
  3. Press Command-Shift-. (period). You should now see lots of files and folders who’s name starts with “.” become visible.
  4. To re-hide the files and folders, hold down Command-Shift-. again.

How to view your Mac’s ~/Library folder

There are a couple of methods for making your ~/Library folder visible. Here’s the simplest:

View Library Folder Mac Yosemite

  1. Click on the Finder in the Dock.
  2. Open a new Finder window and navigate to your user folder (Tip: if it’s not in the sidebar, go to the Finder menu, choose Preferences, click Sidebar and check the box next to your Home folder)
  3. Click on the Go menu.
  4. Hold down the Option (Alt) key.
  5. You should see that in the dropdown menu, Library appears below Home. Click on it.

Alternatively, do this to view your Library folder:

  1. Click on the Finder in the Dock.
  2. Click on the Go menu and choose Go to Folder.
  3. In the window that opens, type “~/Library”

With both these methods, your Library folder will disappear again when you close the Finder window. It’s easy enough to run through the steps above again to make it visible again when you need to, but if you want it permanently accessible, there are a couple of ways to do it.

The quickest is to drag the Library folder to the Finder’s sidebar. That will create a shortcut to it that will persist. If you want to keep ~/Library visible but don’t want it clogging up the sidebar in Finder windows, do this:

  1. Click on the Finder in the Dock.
  2. Click on the View menu and choose Show View Options.
  3. Check the box labelled Show Library Folder at the bottom of the window.

How to make macOS show hidden files using Terminal

If you’re feeling particularly adventurous, you can use the Terminal command line interface to view hidden files and folders. Here’s how to do it:

  1. Open Terminal from the Utilities folder in Applications, or by searching for it using Spotlight. You can also use the Go menu in the Finder to go directly to the Utilities folder.
  2. Type, or copy and paste, this command: defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles true
  3. Press Return
  4. Type: killall Finder

To hide the files again, repeat the above steps, but replace ‘true’ with ‘false’ at the end of step 2.

How to hide any file or folder using Terminal

Now that you know how to view hidden files and folders on your Mac, you may be wondering how you can hide other files or folders, to keep them away from prying eyes. There are a number of third-party applications and utilities that offer to do this for you, but you can do it yourself in Terminal, like this:

  1. Launch Terminal.
  2. Type: chflags hidden
  3. Press the spacebar.
  4. Drag the file or folder you want to hide from the Finder onto the Terminal window.
  5. You’ll see the path to the file or folder displayed in Terminal after the command you typed.
  6. Hit Return to execute the command.

The file or folder you dragged onto the Terminal window will now be hidden. To see it again, use one of the methods described above to see hidden files.

To make the file visible permanently again, use the steps above, but in step 2 type: chflags nohidden

As you can see, viewing hidden files and folders on your Mac is very straightforward. There are a number of ways to do it, and you can make them visible temporarily or permanently.

However, just because you can view hidden files, doesn’t mean you should — the files are usually hidden because accidentally deleting them or altering them could cause chaos on your Mac. So, while it’s fine to have a peek, don’t do anything with the hidden files unless you know what you’re doing.

If you want to declutter your Mac or uninstall applications, use a dedicated application like CleanMyMac X. It will safely remove all useless files, add-ons, broken login items, caches, large and old files you didn't know about. Most likely, you won't even need to look for hidden files — CleanMyMac will do all the job for you.

View Library Folder Mac

We also showed that many of those files are stored in Library folders, including the one in your User folder, ~/Library. That folder is hidden by default, but you can view it or make it permanently visible using the techniques described above.

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